Looking at and pondering what many educational philosophies have in common with each other, I recently achieved a level of clarity and understanding, where everything fell into place for me.  I think I may have come up with a Grand Unified Theory of Homeschooling.  Actually, you could call it a Grand Unified Theory of Education, because I think this idea could be implemented in public schools as well… But, since I am a homeschooler, and this is a homeschooling blog, and to actually implement this in public schools would require far more change than most would probably be willing to do… let’s just stick with the “Homeschooling” side of it for now.

The fundamental basis of this Grand Unified Theory, upon which everything else rests, is this:

The most important stage of learning for any child is not until after they have started adolescence — usually around 14 years old.  There are essential changes that happen to the human brain when it goes through puberty.  Children around this age are capable of complex and abstract thought processes, and are able to analyze facts and ideas with great depth and insight.  This is almost entirely a function of physical development, and is not based on prior learning.

This is fairly well recognized as true, even if you haven’t specifically noticed it before.  This is the age of “high school” in the public schools, which is a very different environment than elementary and middle schools.  Classical education calls this stage “Rhetoric,” where students apply advanced logic and analysis to discuss, defend, and persuade myriad ideas.  The Waldorf tradition speaks of the “14-year change”, the beginning of the third 7-year-cycle of development.  In Waldorf terms, the first stage (up to age 7) is “hands” – primarily active and physical development and learning; the second stage (age 7-14) is “heart,” an age of deep feeling; and 14-21 is “head,” as they move into their intellect.

However you explain it, around age 14 is when our children become truly capable of deep learning.  And so my argument now, is that everything learned before age 14 is merely preparatory.  Not that it is unimportant, but that it is only skeletal.  A framework upon which the real learning that takes place in adolescence can be built.  Much as how knowing the letters of the alphabet is preparatory to reading (but is not, in itself, reading), education in the first 13 years of life is merely the setting up of the basic skills that will be needed for in-depth learning later.

So here is the second part of the Grand Unified Theory of Homeschooling.  Rather than worrying about “what my 5yo should know” or “what does a 3rd grader need to learn,” all we really need to concern ourselves with is “what should my child be able to do by the time he is 14 years old?”

Once you look at it this way, you find an awful lot of freedom.  You will quickly see that there are many ways to arrive at this goal.  And you will also, hopefully, realize that what any child knows at age 6 or 8 or 10 is, by and large, quite irrelevant.  (Not that the knowledge is irrelevant; just the age at which they learned it is irrelevant.)  Whether they start to read at 3 or 11, as long as they can read comfortably by the time they’re 14, that’s all that matters.  Whether they learn long division when they’re 8 or when they’re 13, as long as they’re okay with it by the time they’re 14, they’ll be fine.  Instead of worrying about lists and requirements for each and every year along the way, and whether we’re ahead or behind or what have you… why don’t we take a more long-term view of things?

And so the next piece of the puzzle, therefore, is what are those skills that are needed for the in-depth learning stage of adolescents?

This is my suggested list.  A child 14 years old should, by and large, know or know how to:

• read
• elementary arithmetic, fractions, patterns, decimals.
• cook a simple meal
• write a coherent paragraph
• look up something they don’t know (online or in books)
• do the laundry
• basic concept of historical eras in a broad sense
• basic concept of the earth, continents, and different cultures
• speak a few phrases in another language
• keep their belongings and their personal timetable organized
• basic understanding of money, budgeting
• draw, paint, sculpt
• tell time, understand seasonal cycles (not necessarily the mechanics of why there are cycles, just the fact that there are)
• brush their teeth, wash their hair, shower
• basic understanding of physical sciences (hot air goes up, gravity goes down, birds are alive and rocks are not)
• ride a bike
• swim
• cross the street safely
• talk to other people respectfully
• type
• choose nutritious food
• take public transportation
• light a match, build a campfire
• first aid
• sew on a button
• read music, play a musical instrument, or sing, at a basic level

You will notice that not all of this list is academic subjects.  In fact, most of it is not.  Yet all of these topics are, or should be, essential aspects of any child’s education.  They are all important skills needed for living life; and life is about much, much more than academic knowledge.

You will also notice that the academic parts of the list are rather short on details.  And that’s precisely the point.  The details are merely that — details.  All the fine-tuning, all the depth, all the details are easily learned in the adolescent or “high school” years.  One child might know a lot about, say, human biology by the time they’re 10, and that’s fine if that’s what interests them.  But it’s not necessary.  All that is truly necessary in the elementary years in terms of science, is that they keep a love of discovery and an interest in the natural world.

The same is true in pretty much every academic area.  Really all that is necessary is a basic framework.  The details and the depth come in high school.

So here is the final part of the Grand Unified Theory of Homeschooling.  Having recognized this list of skills as the goal for the first 13 years of life, it’s quite easy to recognize that it does not take 7-8 years of intense daily work and study to achieve those skills.  Some are best practiced from an early age, so as to develop good habits.  Others can be quite easily learned within a month or two by a 12 or 13-year-old child, even if it was completely ignored before.  Most homeschooling families will recognize that they will have mastered most (if not all) of these skills, at least the academic ones, long before 14 years old.

And so the point is, whatever style of homeschooling you find works best for your child and your family… in the end, the details don’t matter.  You can save yourself a lot of time, and a whole lot of stress, by not worrying about yearly timetables and schedules and curriculum requirements.  You can choose to follow a curriculum if you prefer to have that structure, but you don’t have to stress if your child seems “behind” when they’re 8 years old.  And even if they’re “ahead”, it’s still only just “details” — the real ‘deep’ learning still is not going to happen until they reach adolescence.  Until that time, everything else is just placeholding.  It is introductions.  It is frameworks.  It is exposure.  But that’s all it is.

Within this Grand Unified Theory of Homeschooling, there is an awful lot of freedom.  There is room for every individual circumstance.  Even the age of 14 is somewhat arbitrary… for some children, that stage of brain development comes a year or 2 earlier.  For others, it may be a year or 2 later.  But as a general goal to keep in mind, 14 is pretty consistent.

The main point I want to get across is this.  Grade levels and standard curricula are completely arbitrary, often based on child development science but not always, and are more often about being able to say you “did something” than about that ‘something’ being actually necessary to know at that age or stage.   Year-to-year curricula are useful for organization and planning, for learning habits and routines, but should not be taken as ‘rules’ or absolute guidelines for what a child should know at any particular age.  Far better, less stressful, less time-consuming, whatever homeschooling methodology or philosophy resonates best with you, is to take a long-range view.  Don’t fret about what they retain and what they forget when they’re still young, it’s all merely “details,” the real learning happens later.  Focus less on the year-to-year, and instead focus on the day-to-day art of living.

So what are your thoughts?  Is there something missing from this basic list of skills?  What are your experiences with the adolescent “change,” and how relevant – or not – were your children’s (or your own) learning experiences when younger?

In our case, it’s how I overdid early academics with my son, forcing him to do lots of workbooks (and yes, I do mean *forcing*) when he was far too young because I thought he showed signs of giftedness and wanted to jump on it, having been gifted myself (and never gotten the FULL chance to excel from a young age), as well as a desire to ‘prove’ how superior homeschooling could be.  It created a lot of damage and took us years to heal.

I learned my lesson well and learned a TON about homeschooling methodologies, freedom, child development, etc etc.  I resolved when my daughter Pomme was born years later that she would be unschooled.  At *least* until she was 7.  Around age 7, we might start some gentle academics if she seemed so inclined.  We’d use Montessori “lessons” through toddlerhood (not academic but practical skills) and let her be creative and independent and all that wonderful stuff I didn’t do with my son.  And there would be NO WORKBOOKS!  And I was so happy and pleased with myself, and so looking forward to this ‘better way’.

Well, then my daughter, barely age 2, started begging for workbooks.

Oh, not every day, but when the mood struck her, she could sit at her little desk and work for a solid hour, focussed and uninterrupted.

She’s now going to be turning 5 this December.  Along the way, everything else has indeed gone as planned… the Montessori practical skills, the independent self-reliance, the creative free range imaginative play.  But… she also LOVES to do sit-down academic work.

It’s like they do this on purpose, you know?  Just to drive us mad?  Just to keep us on our toes?  Just to always challenge our drift into complacency?

If she were going to school, she’d be starting kindergarten this year, although with her December birthday I think we’d have the option of delaying a year if we wanted to.  Except when I look at the kindergarten curriculum here… well, she’s finished all that.  It’s been quite awhile since I’ve blogged here, but as a quick catch-up: she’s now reading, loves doing lapbooks and learning about science, is CONSTANTLY asking questions and telling us “I learned something!”, and we’re almost finished Right Start Math level A.

What I really wanted to share right now is the story of what happened yesterday.

This time of year is, of course, back-to-school.  When I was young, this was my favourite time of year.  Yeah, I was a weird kid.  I love school supplies.  New pencils, crisp fresh new books, the latest nifty binders, colourful scissors, sparkly pens… Love it, love it, love it.  I’m almost 40 and I still love it.

I do not love shopping for school supplies this time of year, though.  The store is crowded, full to the rafters with parents dragging their kids around, supply lists in hand, desperately trying to get the 8 binders and the made-in-Canada-only pencils and the right colour pens and the white bristleboard that every store seems to have run out of.  It’s not a fun place, it’s a place of stress.

But, we needed poster mounting tabs for her new world map.  So off we went.

She, of course, was in heaven.  She wanted everything. But the thing that caught her attention most of all, more than the pretty pencils, more than the stickers, more than the bright highlighters… The thing that made her stop and beg… was the “curriculum helpers” workbooks.  Which every other kid in the store was very specifically and deliberately not noticing.

You know the ones I mean.  Every bookstore and stationery store has the little display of these grade-level subject practice books.  Usually there’s one for math, one for reading, and one for writing, as well as a big fat combined one for each grade.

My daughter picked up a grade 2 math book and exclaimed, “mommy!!!  This is math!!!  Can we get this??  Please!??!??”

I’m not making this up.

Now she is advanced in math, but not that advanced.  I took a look through the book, and well yes, she could do some of it, but really it was too much.  So I told her we’d need to look for one that had a “K” or maybe a “1″ on it instead of a “2″.  She eagerly helped me look.  We found “K” math — which a quick glance through proved to be waaaay too easy.  We found “1″ writing… but since we’re doing cursive first, any standard writing book would be useless, besides she’s not interested in writing too much yet anyway.  Unless it’s numbers, or her name.

We eventually did find a “1″ math book, and it was indeed “just right”.

She carried it proudly through the store, beaming.

When we got to the car, she couldn’t wait to start it.  We used her new pencils (I caved there too).  She’d read the instructions out loud, and spell for me any words too difficult for her (‘mom, what’s n-u-m-e-r-a-t-i-o-n?’)  She would squeal with glee when she finished a page.  She would whine with disappointment when she came across an activity that needed coloured pencils (since we had none with us).

When we went to the grocery store next on our errands, she sat in the cart and worked in her new book.

One lady stocking shelves noticed, and commented “oh, are you getting ready for school?”

Pomme grinned and giggled shyly.  I knew she was going to explain that we actually homeschool — she has been very keen on this fact lately.  And indeed, she did.  Almost.

She said “Actually, I do homework!”

“Oh,” said the stock lady, “this is homework, is it?”

I should add that school has not yet started in our district, though I know it has in many other areas.  So it probably seemed a little odd to her that this little girl had homework already.

I whispered to my daughter, “you mean homeSCHOOL, sweetie.”

She laughed and said out loud, “I mean, actually we do home SCHOOL!”

The stock lady said “oh, I see, you do homeschooling?  That must be very nice.”

“Yes,” said Pomme, “It’s way more better than regular school!”

Although it seems we need to work a little on grammar.  Heh.

Jumping on the chance to practice some addition in a ‘natural’ fashion (since she herself brought it up), I then asked:

“What if you have 3 cookies, and then you eat 2 more?”

“That will make 5!”

“What if you have 5 cookies, and then you eat 4 more?”

“That will make 9!”

“This is a harder one… what if you have 2 cookies, and then you eat 6 more?”

“That will make us sick!”

One of the greatest benefits of homeschooling is that when we need to, we can just take some time.

About a year or so ago, I bought the Life of Fred: Fractions book, much to Flipper’s chagrin.  More math!??  This was an atrocity!

Until I started to read the first chapter to him… and he giggled… and he took the book and read it cover to cover.

Of course you’re not supposed to read it cover to cover in one sitting.  You’re supposed to work through the math in each chapter before moving on to the next.  But it was a good sign that he would enjoy the book, and he was more than happy to read it again, this time stopping to do the math along the way.

Within a few chapters, I was impressed enough that I went ahead and ordered the rest of the books, from Decimals through to high school Geometry.

However, after awhile, things began to bog down.

Flipper has always had difficulty with retention, especially in math.  He will learn a new concept, clearly demonstrate solid understanding of it, successfully complete several lessons on it… and when the concept comes up again a few weeks later, he insists he’s never ever ever done this before and has a meltdown.  It takes a ridiculous amount of re-learning and repetition before something actually, permanently, ‘sticks’.

This is why we’ve gone through so many different math programs through the years, often repeating the same “level” in different programs.  Each one is great, but not enough for him to be able to move on just yet.

And so it started with Life of Fred.  Although he had previously done most of the fraction concepts with Teaching Textbooks (I knew he needed more review, which is why I purchased LoF in the first place), it was like he’d never seen them before.  He was starting to have trouble with the “Bridge” unit tests.

At one point, he ‘flunked’ all 5 Bridge options at the end of one unit, and even after attempting them a second time, he still could not get enough correct answers to show he understood what was happening.  In fact, it was very clear that he did not.

So, we put it away.  And we focused solely on the RightStart level E he was already doing.

Fast-forward to this year.  He is now well into RightStart Geometry and loving it.  When we found a massive printing error that required us to wait for a new copy (which they gladly shipped to us at no charge), we decided to start Teaching Textbooks Pre-Algebra in the meantime, and also to get back into Life of Fred.

Now that I think about it, this Teaching Textbooks was also a “get back into” event.  After having finished TT Grade 6 two years ago, we tried going straight into TT Pre-Algebra, but it was again quickly obvious that he had not retained well enough and it was too ‘dry’ for him.  That’s when we switched to RightStart E in the first place.

This time it was completely different.  The first 25 or so chapters of TT Pre-Algebra have been a piece of cake for him.  Although many concepts which really are review for him still seem to him like “new” concepts, at least he is not getting stuck, nor is he getting frustrated.

And Life of Fred?

Well, today he finished the last chapter, after having sailed through every single Bridge along the way on the very first try.

The Final Bridge, however, was not successful on the first attempt, due to a single repeating error — using the ‘shortcut’ for turning a mixed number into an improper fraction, he put the resulting figure in the denominator instead of the numerator.   Now this did result in a meltdown when he realized he’d blown the entire thing, having made this mistake every single time.

But now that he’s done that, I highly doubt he’ll ever make that slip again!

In fact, when he went to bed tonight, he asked if he could work on the Final Bridge second version, so that he could start the Decimals book tomorrow.  And he asked to take the Decimals book to bed with him as well… just in case he did finish the Bridge successfully this time.

All this is simply to demonstrate the value of time.  The value of putting something away and bringing it back later… whether that means after doing practice in other curricula, or just letting some maturing happen.  I really do think that 90% of the difference has been simply the fact that he’s a year more mature, though certainly the RightStart program helped immensely as well.

To do so… to put something away when it is too much right now… is not to admit defeat.  It is not a failure.  In public school, there would be no option.  Each child must march in lock step with the entire class, and if it’s too much too soon, or too fast… too bad.  Any difficulties are indeed perceived as failures.

But at home, we can be more realistic.  It’s not the child that’s at fault.  It’s just not the right time for this program.  You take a break, with no recriminations or disappointments, and you try again later.  We can allow the development that happens with time to unfold at its own pace, and work with our kids where they are rather than where some artificial and arbitrary standard says they ought to be.

Okay, I wasn’t going to get into this whole “Tot School” thing, since we’re not really doing all that much in terms of formal schooling.  But, she did a few really cool things this week, and I know that “Tot School” isn’t supposed to necessarily mean “formal schooling” anyway, so I decided to jump on board and share.  Maybe next week I’ll take more pictures too…

First, art.  I’ve been getting Waldorf-y lately art-wise.  I’ve just read Painting with Children — I’ll post a review of that another time.  I’ve also broken down and ordered Stockmar watercolour paints and some accessories (painting board, paint jars and holder)… We’re still awaiting those, so I decided not to do the typical early Waldorf painting experience, where we would start with just one colour to fully experience it.  Pomme loves drawing great details — even though she’s only 3, she draws people with hair, eyelashes and eyebrows, toes, teeth, clothes… she draws a baseline too, which is apparently very unusual for her age.

So I decided to do a Waldorf-inspired “child copies the parent” painting.  I started with a light wash on part of the paper, for the grass, which she then imitated.  Then another wash for the sky.  Then we added a tree, apples on the tree (using a different brush technique), a sun in the sky, and a few people around the tree, all of which she duly (and most excitedly) imitated!

Here is my finished model:

According to Waldorf art principles, the people are deliberately simple, mere suggestions of people.  Here is her finished work — she had a bit too much water in the tree paint, so it ended up spreading and fading as it dried, obscuring just how amazing her tree looked originally.  But it still looks pretty cool!

Notice that her people are more detailed than mine — she tried to add faces, hair, etc, which didn’t work as well with the thicker paintbrushes, but she refused to just to basic shapes like I had.  The taller person is daddy, apparently, and the shorter one is her.  Then there’s a mere suggestion of a person on the other side of the tree — that’s one of her imaginary friends!

This was such a fun and simple activity.  We’ll definitely do this sort of thing again.

The only other thing we did ‘formally’ this week was math.  We’re working through Right Start level A — nice and slow, she’s only 3!  But she gets it and she loves it, so why not, eh?

So far, she’s learned to recognize quantities up to ten at sight (when grouped as “five and something”), using fingers, objects, tally sticks, or the abacus; instantly count aural taps up to ten; parallel and perpendicular; squares, rectangles and triangles (which she mostly already knew, but didn’t know a square was also a rectangle!); and repeating patterns with up to 4 elements (ie, Red Red Blue Green).

Rather than using the “bead cards” (reproducible in the appendix of the book) as a manipulative, I decided to make Montessori-style bead bars — like the golden bead bars, but using the 5-and-something patterns of Right Start, and using natural wood beads à la Waldorf.  Here’s one finished set:

I’m actually really proud of how these turned out.  I plan to make another post describing how they’re made, with more photos, and a video of Pomme helping!  She instantly recognizes each one, it’s so cool.

This week she did her first official math worksheet, as part of lesson 10.  This was writing tally marks to match the number of objects shown.  She’s only 3, so her writing is not great, but I think it’s darn good for a 3yo… (today she wrote “mom” on her own…)

Ain’t she something?!?

One big change is that I stopped thinking in 6-week blocks a long time ago.  We will be going back into something like that, though, once we get our Waldorf on.  I’ve also been tracking what we’ve been doing with homeschoolskedtrack, which is fantastic, and lets me see at a glance exactly what we did, and when, and what we’re going to be doing, and (approximately) when!

Just for fun, I thought I’d check in and post an update, subject-for-subject in comparison with the March post.  So here we go, seven-and-a-half months later (or about 100 potential “school days”, accounting for occasional summer breaks…) this is how we’ve progressed:

Math

In March, we were at lesson 59 in RightStart level E.  Now we’ve finished lesson 108, and the end is in sight!  If we continue on schedule, we will be finished the level before Christmas and we’ll start Intermediate Geometry in January.  Recent lessons have focused on polygons, angles, and lots of drawing.

Over 100 school days, we’ve only worked on RightStart half the time, apparently.  But I should remember that we took a short break to focus on Life of Fred (which we didn’t have yet last March) and another break for some Math Mammoth extra fractions practice.

Our current math situation consists of RightStart every day, as well as additional practice time on ALEKS and/or Mathletics, both of which we’re trying out to see which one we will stick with.  We love ALEKS but Mathletics seems to be winning right now… Life of Fred is on hiatus just while we drive through the rest of RightStart level E, but he’s waiting patiently and we will have fun with him again soon!

Canadian Studies/Geography

The who the what now?  Oh that’s right, we used to be working on this.  But with so much on our plate, something had to go, and this was one of the somethings.  We will get back into it, probably with a multi-week block at some point.  It’s not gone forever, just not a current priority.

In fact, I’ve just downloaded a nifty learning-geography-through-art e-book (a really MASSIVE one) from currclick… looking forward to drawing from this resource (punny!) soon!

French

We’ve moved on from the oral-only approach we were using in the spring.  I think it did the trick, getting him over his last hurdles and fears about the language.  We had previously finished book 1 and started book 2 of L’art de lire, but took such a long break that he’d forgotten nearly everything.  I ordered fresh copies of books 1 and 2 (we still have all the CD’s and books 3-6) and we started anew!

Last week, we finished book 1 and are currently in the first unit of book 2.  I think he’s picking it up much better than before, and he certainly complains about it less!

While l’art de lire does have a CD, it is primarily a written language program.  So we’ve also added a primarily oral program, continuing the sort of thing I had started with him.  I’ve chosen Ecoutez, Parlez, and I have to say he loves it!  True to Charlotte Mason philosophies, the lessons are short and easy.  He simply repeats the same unit for 9 days, then goes on to the next unit.  He’s even started using some of the phrases he’s learned in everyday situations — a sure sign that it’s sticking!

Literature

This area was fascinating for me to review what we were doing in March, because it has reminded me of some things I should really bring back.  Somewhere along the way, we’ve lost his independent reading time.  He has been reading on his own, of course, but not overly much, and we’ve done virtually no literary narration at all for months.

So I will need to make sure I reincorporate reading time, with assigned books, into his daily rhythm.

On the plus side, though, we’ve maintained and even expanded read-aloud time, where I read to him.  Once we finished “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” we started “The Hobbit.”

This was met with… some resistance.  I think he remembered when I had tried reading The Hobbit to him years ago, when he was really too young and it was a disaster.  This time, he was literally yelling and crying at the thought.  I played the “mean mommy” card and started reading it to him anyway, yelling right over his wails.

Within the first page, he had stopped and was listening, then smiling.  Then begging for more.

In fact, when we finished “The Hobbit”, he begged that we continue straight into “Lord of the Rings”.  A challenging book for an 11-year-old, even if he doesn’t have to do the actual reading himself!

I’m so pleased to say that he’s been loving it.  It’s very slow going, we’ll go days where it’s just descriptions of landscapes, but he doesn’t mind.  He doesn’t mind my attempted renditions of elvish epic poetry.  And he has an astonishing recall of detail.

The party accompanying the ring has just set out from Rivendell and is quickly approaching Moria.  Flipper joked “300 pages in, and the story’s finally getting started!”

Anyway, I’ve also started reading aloud at snack time.  For this, it’s “Watership Down.”  Considering how much he has loved the feline “Warriors” series, I think he’ll enjoy the rabbits.

History

Back in March, I was free-styling my way through Ancient History.  Since then, we dove into History Odyssey – first with the level II free trial, and then (when that proved too much for him, being very new to the subject and a reluctant writer) the level I free trial.

Level I has been going much better — we supplement it a LOT with additional materials, but it’s a good core.  I’m still not sure, though, whether I’ll actually purchase the rest of the program once we’ve finished the free trial materials.  We may just continue on our own, now that I’ve got a better idea of how to go about it.

We have been moving very slowly through Ancient History.  Partly because we had stopped level II and then started over again in level I… but we’re still in ancient Mesopotamia.  That’s okay though, he’s enjoying it and just built a cool model ziggurat!

Science

In March, we were at week 22 of NOEO Biology II but had to backtrack a bit because he hadn’t been doing his summaries.  7 months later, we’ve just finished week 26…

Oy!  We’re taking our time with this.  Most weeks we only do 2 or 3 lessons, instead of the recommended 4.  I think that once we start working in blocks, I’m going to have a NOEO block, to really drive through and finish this thing.

It’s not that he doesn’t enjoy it.  In fact, right now we’re in a unit of building body models which he is having a great time with.  It’s just that it hasn’t been a priority.

We’ve added some other science-y stuff too, such as his Intellego unit study on Whales.  This is by far one of his favourite subjects.  We have a lapbook on Marine Habitats which we will do in the near future, as well.

Once we’re finished NOEO, we’re going to go through Ellen McHenry’s The Elements… then we’ll decide where to go from there.

I think that’s more than enough for one post… Look for part 2, where I’ll discuss what we’ve been doing in Music, Art, Grammar, Poetry, Handwriting, and Miscellaneous.

While all that was going on, on what otherwise would have been his first day of middle school, this was our day:

Slept in until about 8. Took our time having a healthy, hot breakfast.  No rush to get anywhere.  On to the “school day”:

Math: Lesson and practice on finding prime factors, practice on finding equivalent fractions, least common multiples, and adding unlike fractions.

Science:  Lesson on cellular biology.  Lesson on cetaceans, taxonomy of animals.  Watched videos of whales surfacing and free-diving with whales.

Grammar and Spelling:  Two practice pages on spelling rules, sentence combining, direct vs. indirect object, capitalization and punctuation, verbal analogies.  Daily list of 25 patterned spelling words.

Handwriting:  Began a new handwriting program to work with Flipper’s bad writing habits and difficulties — “Italics, Beautiful Handwriting for Children.”  Did the first two lessons.

French:  3 pages of written translations and exercises.

Phys. ed:  Running around outside, doing pushups.

Home ec:  Helping mom with washing walls, doors, and appliances; bringing in garbage and recycle bins; tidying the kitchen, doing laundry, cleaning his room, taking out the compost.

Music:  Practice on his electric guitar.

Poetry:  Tuesday Poetry Tea-Time, sharing cookies and iced tea and reading classic poetry to each other while practicing proper manners and politeness.  Well, mostly.

Reading:  Sitting outside in the sun, reading the latest in his current favourite book series.

Civics:  Watched Obama’s address to American kids online, discussed his reaction to it, and how it related to us in Canada.

All this and lunch too.  Probably about half of his work is independent, I don’t have to be actively “teaching” him or hovering over him for many of his lessons.  And he was finished everything – including “non-school” things like helping around the house, tea-time, and guitar practice – well before the neighbourhood kids were home from school. Total “academic” time was about 3 hours, maybe 3-and-a-half.

For most of the rest of the day, he played Civilization III on the PC, and regaled me with his tales of wiping Germany off the face of the earth (eeps!), learning that Kyoto was not just a misspelling of Tokyo, and finding the natural resources needed for steam locomotives to be developed.

He went snorkeling in the bathtub, helped me put together his schedule for tomorrow (his idea!), and went to bed with no homework and a smile on his face.

Whew!  A productive, happy, interesting day!

While Flipper was doing this, Pomme wanted in on the action too, of course.  She insisted on doing the same handwriting pages as Flipper, so I printed out a page for her too.  Doggone-it if she didn’t start writing beautiful “i’s” and “j’s” and “l’s”, just like that.  Shall I remind you she’s not yet 3?

She also practiced flower arranging, spoon-transfer of marbles, getting herself dressed and undressed (multiple times), emptied the dishwasher, sorted and dealt playing cards, counted on her fingers, watched Totoro again and told us all about it, acted out parts of the story, introduced us to yet another new imaginary friend, helped clean the kitchen, and “read” poetry to us at tea-time.

Now at this point, I should specify that we “do school” year-round, taking breaks and vacations whenever it’s convenient for us.  So sometimes we’re not working when kids are in school, and other times we are working when kids are not in school… which some people think is kind of weird.  But whatever.  That’s the freedom of homeschooling. We don’t have to take two months off just because it’s warm outside (we just move the lessons outside as much as possible!)  So today was not a sudden “first day back to classes,” Flipper has been “working” all summer.

But we don’t do as much over the summer as you might think, since there are summer camps, trips to visit family, gymnastics four days a week, and long lazy days where you just decide that sitting in the sun with your feet up is the most productive way to spend your time.

What did I do today? Other than working with my kids when they needed it, of course, I made cookies for tea-time, started planning fall repertoire for my band, did some laundry, cooked meals, did some gardening, goofed around on the internet, and actually updated my blog!

Homeschooling totally rocks our world.

There were days that we abided strictly to the schedule, eschewed distractions, and were finished everything by noon.  There were days that we scattered ‘lessons’ throughout the day, fitting them in here and there, while doing other things in the meantime.  And there were days when we just said “screw it, we’ve got other stuff to do today” and tried to squish that day’s lessons into the rest of the week as best as we could.  That’s one of the great things about homeschooling, though… that flexibility.

So here we go, subject by subject:

Math

We’re using RightStart Math, on level E.  At the beginning of the session, we were on lesson 39, and ended at lesson 59.   My goal was to end at lesson 65, doing a lesson pretty much every single day.  This means we “lost” one lesson each week. So, I think for the next session, I will only schedule 4 lessons each week and leave on day as a ‘games day’.  We’ve really been neglecting the games, and Flipper really does love them.  I confess that I’d like to get through this level quickly so we can get to Intermediate Geometry, but I really need to take my own advice and not worry about hurrying him through so much.

On the whole, the lessons have gone well.  He still has occasional ‘stubborn days’ where he insists that he’s forgotten everything he’s ever learned about math — or insists that he never learned it in the first place — but these are becoming rarer, and by the end of the worst of these lessons he always says “you know what?  That was actually kind of fun!”

He’s learned about area, square feet and yards, mixed and improper fractions, decimals, converting tenths and hundredths from fraction to decimal and vice versa, and metric measurements.  Along the way, he’s picked up squares (and other exponents) and square roots, and order of operations.

Canadian Studies/Geography

We started at lesson 2 and have completed lesson 5 out of the guidebook I’m using for a foundation, just for structure.  Each lesson involves several days of activities and we don’t do this topic every day.  We’re using some of the worksheets from this book and I’m adding in other activities like our Canada Puzzle Map.  I had hoped to be into lesson 6 but I’m happy with this pace.

He’s learned the provinces and territories and their capitals, both in terms of name and location.  He knows the oceans around the country and the postal abbreviations for each province. We also start each week singing O Canada together.   I didn’t do anything formal or grand or even print out the lyrics… I just sang for him!  He now sings along for the entire song in English, then I repeat it in French.  He’s starting to pick up some of the French bits too, and was very interested about the very different meaning of the French version of the anthem!

French

We had previously done some French language curriculum, but it never stuck and we couldn’t keep it up.  So this time around I decided to just forego the curriculum altogether and do what Charlotte Mason suggests — we’d just speak it first.

Flipper is not a boy who enjoys the physical act of writing.  All the written exercises were getting in his way.  It also just makes sense that we learn language first and foremost as a way of speaking, and then only afterwards do we learn to transpose that symbolically onto paper.

We started with reviewing the dozen or so words he already knew and adding a few ‘extra bits’ to make a couple basic sentences.  He already knew all the colour words, for instance.  So I asked him “Quel couleur est-ce que c’est?”, pointing to various things, and he’d answer “c’est rouge” or “c’est noir” or whatever it happened to be.  We didn’t worry about how c’est is a contraction of the pronoun ce and the verb est which is the third-person present conjugation of être… blah blah blah. He’ll figure that out later.

Over the session, he’s learned to count to 100, tell time, identify various foods, use comparative opposite adjective (lourd-léger, long-court, grand-petit, etc), and we’ve started singing the avoir and être conjugation songs (to the tune of Mexican Hat Dance, if you didn’t know…)

I can’t believe how much he’s loving this approach.  We spend at most 10 minutes a day and he never complains, in fact he’s excited and keen to show off what he knows.  He especially loves colours and started turning things around, asking me the question “quel couleur est-ce que c’est?” at random times.  Important point:  I never specifically taught him to say that sentence, he just imitated me saying it.

We’ll probably do purely oral french for at least one more session if not two.  Now that we’ve learned the basic verb conjugations, I plan on working in more complete sentences for him.  We’ll learn some animals and some related verbs, maybe things like dormir and courir and manger and marcher…

Literature

Under this heading, I’ve created a list of “great books” that we own, which he hasn’t read yet.  Each day he reads one chapter, more or less, and narrates it to me.  I’ve offered for him to do alternate narration styles, such as drawing a scene or making it in Lego (which, honestly, I thought he’d love), but his preference is always to just orally tell me about it.  He has really, really taken to narration.

First of all, at bedtime I’ve been reading to him from The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  I don’t officially count this as “school” for him, but we do practice narration.  In fact, we started this before we started the “new” Charlotte Mason curriculum, as kind of a ‘test run’ to see how the style suited him.  Basically, at the end of each reading I ask him to tell me “what happened”, and at the beginning of the next session I ask “now, where were we?”  It’s fascinating to see what he picks up on, what he misses, what he does and doesn’t understand.

For his “official” literature, which he is reading himself, he started with Pippi Longstocking and finished that within a week.  I couldn’t stop him from reading more than he was “supposed” to each day!

So we went to something a bit more challenging  — The Secret Garden.  I had to warm him up to that one by reading to him myself.  I would have happily read the entire book to him, but by chapter two he was hooked and insisted on reading it himself!

When that was finished, we moved on to “Island of the Blue Dolphins,” and that’s where he is now.

I had only expected to finish Pippi and be into The Secret Garden, so in this area he’s surpassed my expectations!

History

As this is the first time we’ve done history formally, we started at the very beginning.  Not in terms of the most ancient history, but just readings about history… Why we learn about history, how historians do their work, and especially, archaeology.

We also started a Book of Centuries and while we’re not yet in a regular routine of adding to it, he was surprisingly keen on the idea.

He already subscribes to Dig magazine which was a great resource in addition to the encyclopedias we’re using as our “core” books.  No real ‘living books’ for history this session, but we’re going to more than make up for that next session – Ancient Egypt!

Science

We’re using NOEO Science, Biology II.  Four days a week, and generally he does this independently.  I had planned to be finished week 23 at this point… looking at his notes, it seems that he’s on week 22, but hasn’t been doing the summaries for the last 2 weeks!  So some backtracking is in order, to make sure he’s actually covered everything.  And I’ll need to keep a closer eye on things next session.

Of the summaries he did in the first few weeks, one especially caught my eye.  He generally does just a short written narration, a couple sentences at most, and a more detailed drawing (one of the reasons we love this science program!)  This particular lesson was about the opossum’s defensive death-faking.  His sketch showed an opossum (with an arrow pointing to it labelled ‘opossum’), a predator looking over it (with an arrow labelled ‘predator’), and a word balloon from the predator saying “I’m not going to eat a DEAD opossum!”

He also did a really cool experiment, digging rodent bones out of an owl pellet.  I actually meant to blog about that, we took a ton of pictures… I’ll have to remember to do that.  It was fascinating.  After he had found and cleaned all the bones, we identified them and glued them onto a skeleton template.  It makes quite a keepsake!

Music

My intention for this session was to focus on Mozart… listen to Mozart every day and read a book about his life.  This got derailed a bit in the second week when the book disappeared, which was a shame because Flipper was actually enjoying it.

Still, we listened to Mozart quite a lot, and talked about some important things about him.  He knows that I’m currently playing the Requiem with the orchestra and that I’ve previously performed it in choirs.  Maybe we’ll be able to get him to come to the concert…

I had also hoped to get him back on track with regular piano practice, but that didn’t happen this session.  He is playing his electric guitar regularly and has started watching some instructional videos on YouTube.  All the same, for the most part he only wants to figure out songs he knows from “Guitar Hero”, and make up his own bizarre nonsense songs, and isn’t responsible about actually learning to play well.  Not that there’s anything wrong with what he’s doing — he actually shows some fantastic innate feel for riffs and patterns with the songs he makes up — and he’s gone so far as to create an entire tracklist for his “debut CD”, recording himself on his MP3 player, drawing the cover artwork, the whole shebang.

So I’m not at all knocking that part of it… it’s just that it’s not enough if he wants to actually get further with it, which he says he does.  He’s going to need to learn to buckle down and do some nitty-gritty practice, not just playing for fun.  One step at a time, I guess….

Grammar

We’re using Daily Grams, grade 5, one page every day.  He’s finished lesson 100, and I had planned to be on 105.  So, like Math, we’ve lost about one lesson per week.  So I’ll probably bring it down to 4 times per week for the next session.  He’s doing fine in this… still has a habit of guessing when he doesn’t know instead of looking a word up in the dictionary or (heaven forbid!) asking me for help, but he’s improved a lot.

Handwriting

Using A Reason for Handwriting, level F.   We fell behind when his book was misplaced for a couple weeks.  I used that as an opportunity to do some more ‘traditional’ Charlotte Mason style copywork, taking selections from his history or literature books, for example.  He didn’t really like that.  He complained that I made the passages too long!

The book was eventually found, and he’s completed week 18.  Hopefully next session will be more on-track.  I think maybe I’ll alternate, a week of Reason for Handwriting followed by a week of copywork from his other books… and I’ll try not to make them too long!

Poetry

Starting in the second week, we’ve been working through a basic poetry-writing manual, doing lessons twice a week.  He’s learned how to write limericks, concrete poems, rainbow poems, and parodies (possibly his favourite!)

We’ve now finished that part of the book, the next part is on writing prose stories.  I gave him the option of continuing with that, or instead, staying with poetry but reading poems (such as A Child’s Garden of Verses).  He’s chosen to write stories, so that’s what we’ll do next session.

Art

We added art appreciation in the fourth week, twice a week.  We decided to start with DaVinci.  I put the Mona Lisa as his desktop picture, but he wasn’t impressed, he wanted his dolphins back!  We looked at a bunch of DaVinci’s paintings and sketches online and chatted a bit about his life and importance.

I had him copy one of DaVinci’s paintings, and he chose “Lady with an Ermine”.  He hasn’t finished colouring it yet… but he enjoyed the project.

In our last week, we found a fun book about DaVinci in our library, a real “living book,” a kid’s story based on real events in DaVinci’s life with large colourful pictures.  It was a very easy read for him, intended for younger kids for sure, but he found it fun and enjoyable.

Miscellaneous

Finally, there are a few various things that we put in once or twice a week.  To work on his logic skills, I schedule a Mind Benders puzzle once a week — though he loves these so much he’ll often do extras on his own time.  He’s now in book A3.

To work on reading comprehension and analysis, he has one Reading Detective lesson per week.  He’s very good at getting the point of a story, but still has trouble with the analysis of where the information came from.

And also on reading comprehension but also with values lessons, he does studies on Aesop’s fables twice a week.  I believe the workbook is called “Christian Values Using Aesop’s Fables.”  They’re short and easy lessons, and he enjoys them.

Whew.  I think that’s it… It really is enlightening to get this all written up, to see just how much we are doing!  Some days we just feel so lazy, it’s good to remind ourselves that overall, we’re more than fine.

In addition to these, I’m hoping to add some journalling and/or dictation next session, or maybe get back into our spelling practice.  I’m really looking forward to the Ancient Egypt studies, though!  I’ve learned more just in preparing for this unit, than I ever learned in school about Ancient History (which is precisely: nothing at all).

Flipper was going to a friend’s house at lunchtime today, so he did most of his schoolwork this morning.  Since we’re following a kind of Charlotte Mason approach lately, most of his work is very short little things… he read a couple pages in an archaeology atlas and told me about them, read a chapter in his new book Island of the Blue Dolphins and told me about it, did a science lesson (NOEO, which involves reading a couple pages then writing a short summary), did a wordsearch puzzle on Canadian provinces and capital cities… really the only thing that is usually time-consuming is his math, and that’s only because he’s so distracted and fidgety it takes forever to get through the lesson.

The warmup wasn’t too bad today, he enjoys the puzzle numbers challenge.  The division facts practice sheet, however, is the big time killer.  He’ll start off with “I don’t know how to do this!!” (he’s known how to do division for at least 3 years), then start saying “what’s 4 divided by 24!!!  That makes no sense!!” (the question is 24/4)… before finally settling in and doing one question.  Rinse, repeat.  Or he stops to talk to his sister, blaming her for distracting him.  Etc etc.

Eventually he gets it done, and we move to the main lessons.  Millimeters today, and writing decimals to thousandths.  We love RightStart, how it has interwoven fractions, percents, decimals, and measurements in a beautiful way showing the interrelationships and having it all make sense.  He’s got it mastered to hundredths so far, and yet when we started by me writing 3.28 and asking him to read it, he said “three twenty-eighths.”  Sigh.  This is the frustrating part, when he knows how to do something but doesn’t stop to think, just randomly starts guessing as though it’s something he’s never seen before.

He did remember pretty quickly this time.  I wonder if the glare of death I shot his way had any accellerative action on his mental recovery.  I’m a good mommy.

The lesson itself went fine after that, he already knew that there were 10mm in 1cm, and 1000mm in 1m, so all seemed fine.  Until the first question on the worksheet… it asks to shade in on a picture of a ruler: one dm, plus one cm, plus one mm.  No problem, quickly done.  Then it asks how many mm that is.  He looks at it and starts thinking out loud… “let’s see… 10 hundred and…”  What?  Ten hundred?  Okay, how many mm are in a cm?  “A hundred!”  What?

Glare of death to the rescue again.  I’m a very good mommy.

Finally, he was set to finish the worksheet on his own and I went to do some housework, telling him to come get me when he was done.  It was not more than 10 minutes later he came to me, completed math in hand, cheery and chipper, saying “That was actually fun!!”

Oy vey.

I’m looking forward to the day when he remembers that he finds math fun before the lesson starts, rather than not until close to the very end.  Because this happens Every. Single. Day.

Anyway.  The other schoolish tasks on the schedule today were postponed until after he got back from his friend’s.  So we had a french lesson at suppertime — right now I’m just doing oral french with him for at least a few months, building up vocabulary and ease, before starting over with L’art de lire.  We had previously got into book 2, but it wasn’t “sticking” for him and it was torturous.  I believe that with a confidence in the basics of the spoken language already under his belt, all that writing will be less intimidating.

So far, he’s learned to count to 100, tell time, all the colours, how to say “I love to play the guitar”, a few foods, and some adjective opposites (thick/thin, big/little, tall/short, heavy/light).  He likes doing it this way, and especially the “big” numbers like 97, which literally translates to “four twenties and seventeen”.  Gotta love it.

Finally, his poetry-writing book had him writing a popcorn poem today, so he suggested we make some tonight and he would recite it to us, which we did, and he did.  Grandiose as all get-out in his delivery.  It was a silly little poem and missed the point of it being an exercise in sensory description (how does popcorn feel, smell, look, etc)… It was more like instructions on how you yourself could pretend to be popcorn by curling up into a ball then jumping up high.  But… coming from a hyperkinetic kid, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised.

What we didn’t get done today… his cursive, because he couldn’t find the book.  Daily Grams, because he’s done 10 pages since I last checked it so now I have to check it and tomorrow we’ll review any glitches.  And a few things that weren’t on the schedule for today… logic puzzles, Aesop’s fables, art, music.

Flipper has been asking about pi quite a bit recently… he wanted to know what it was, what it meant, and he wanted to know how far I had it memorized.  (3.1415926 is all I have now, but in my prime (prime!  math pun!) I had probably a dozen digits more)

So I thought he might be excited to celebrate today.  His reaction when I told him?  “But I don’t really know what pi is.”  *sigh*  He was at his father’s today to boot, so I couldn’t even organize a variety of pi-themed activities to show him more about what pi is all about anyway.

But, I baked a pie.

Last fall, I froze a half-dozen pies, several apple and several blueberry, as a bit of an experiment.  I wanted to find out if I could make fresh pies with fresh, local fruit for the filling, freeze them, and have them turn out edible a few months later.  I’ve VERY pleased to say that the experiment was a complete success.  They have been scrumptious.  Today, in fact, I baked the last one of the pies, an apple pie put together with hand-picked apples from hubby’s historic family cottage/riverfront/camp down near Saint John.

It was yummy.  And since it was baked in a 9″ pie pan, the circumference was 9×3.1415926, or about 28-1/4″, and the area was 3.1415926×4.5^2, or about 63-1/2 sq in.